On the long road to recovery

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The main surprise in the trading update from Hays is that net fees, and therefore activity from the UK public sector, are ticking up again after three years of decline. There was a marked 6 per cent rise in fee income in the fourth quarter to end-June.

This is modest compared with the 57 per cent decline in such work from its peak in 2009 to the trough in April last year, and the company believes that it does not mark some restart of the public sector jobs boom. Rather, with most of the cuts at local authorities earmarked, employees